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I was reading things through my Twitter feed the other day and came across this article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols discussing the choice that Google, Canonical and others have made to not use Linux in the name of their products. It's not going to turn your world upside down, and it's fairly trivial on some levels, but it is interesting. I use both Ubuntu and Android. I selected them because they have Linux as their foundation, but more specifically because out of similar choices they just did what I wanted the way I wanted.

There is a good deal of discussion about the fact that there are so many Linux distributions. "There's too much choice!" In reality most of these offerings are distinctive in some way, and merely share their foundational parts of Linux and GNU tooling. So far Android has been very successful. Ubuntu seems to be the Linux-based computing environment that more people recognize. Those are good things.

Considering Cassandra

When I became editor of the Open Source site on developerWorks I was inundated with various databases and data framesworks and other similar pieces. Databases and such are fairly successful in the open-source world because that sort of work is a kind of voodoo to a lot of people. It largely runs behind the scenes and gives up data when I ask for it and hides data away when I tell it to. It's an easy place to insert open-source without upsetting people because they don't necessarily deal with the moving parts anyway.

As time has passed I've seen a lot more in the NoSQL areas and with cloud, mobile and all the strange and unusual places we try to put software nowadays I can appreciate the need to know about as many alternatives as you can. As long as the data remains open, flexibility on how you interact with it is handy and can help you turn a bad situation into an innovative opportunity.

Large drives and GPT

When I can buy a 2TB drive to sit on my desk for $99 do I really need to worry about drive tuning? I would say that makes it even more important! What a shame to have a big giant drive and then waste a good deal of it because the data isn't partitioned optimally. I'm still interested in learning more about different drive tuning techniques, especially since I run Linux, because I can mix and match some of that a little more than I might in other environments.

Blender foo

As some of you know, I've been playing around with Blender, the free, open-source 3D modelling, animation and compositing software. I'm still just a baby, but I'm slowly learning how to do interesting things with it. Today I wanted to design a logo for a community group I'm building. I wanted to do something unusual. Tinkering with Blender, I found that one could import SVG files, created in Inkscape, and then manipulate them to have depth. I took some silhouettes that I was playing with and managed to create the following graphic. (be sure to click on it and see it full sized)

Admittedlymy picture won't win any kind of design awards, but it really shows what can be done by bringing things into a 3D environment and playing with light and such rather than simply drawing. I'll be doing much more with this. Of course, once it's designed, it's easy to move the camera around to get different perspectives and even shoot some sort of video where you move through the picture.

Blender is just one of the coolest things. I'm making this image available under Creative Commons, using the (cc-by) license. Please feel free to use it as you wish, just please give me credit.